Strangeness blooms

This is it! Only a few weeks remain until Moonbound’s launch.

Here’s me and the book, ready to go.

Thanks to everyone who has preordered, and espe­cially to everyone who also forwarded their order confir­ma­tion email to preorder@robinsloan.com.

Remember, I’ve printed a passel of limited-edition zines, which I’ll soon mail to those preorder-ers who have made themselves known.

This zine was a Risograph production, naturally. I love using the Riso — the electro­mechan­ical beep and whirr, the distinct layers of ink.

One side of the 11×17″ print is actually a poster — 

—and it turned out so beau­ti­fully that I am almost sorry to fold it for mailing!

(Not really, though. I know I’m not alone in having ordered many lovely, “precious” prints from the internet … only to have them sit in a stack. I like the vibe, instead, of a low-fuss production tacked to the wall for a season, or stuck to the fridge, then happily composted.)

(That said: I printed a couple hundred extra of this poster side, which I might offer as a proper purchase sometime in the future. Mailing oversize pages flat and safe is, unfortunately, a bit pricy.)

As for the zine’s reverse side … 

 … ya gotta preorder to see that! It is a sort of char­cu­terie plate of world­building material, including an early look at the fictional script I designed for this book. (More on that in the next edition.)

You can preorder from your local bookstore, or a bookstore suggested on my Moonbound home page, or an online retailer:

• Bookshop
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

Forward your order confir­ma­tion email to preorder@robinsloan.com and I’ll mail you one of these zines for your wall, fridge, and/or library.

The tour

I’m hitting the road for Moonbound! Here’s my schedule:

June 10: Green Apple Books on the Park, San Francisco

June 12: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Washington

June 13: Mrs. Dalloway’s, Berkeley, California

June 15: McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro, North Carolina

June 17: Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, New York

June 18: Magic City Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma

June 21: Copperfield’s Books, Petaluma, California

June 23: SF in SF, The American Book­binders Museum, San Francisco

June 27: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, California

I’ll rustle up links to all those events for my next newsletter; in the meantime, if you’re proximate to any of those bookstores, mark your calendar! I hope to see you out there.

The four weeks ahead will be, in a lot of ways, the most conse­quen­tial of my writing career. They’ll set the whole shape of Moonbound’s trajectory: opening up possi­bil­i­ties for foreign editions (or not); lighting the engines of tele­vi­sual adap­ta­tion (or not); and, most importantly, by far, deter­mining whether I can spend the next decade or so as I dream I might: contin­uing this series, expanding its scope, stretching to probe the limits of imagination.

That, and commis­sioning more maps!!

Think, friends, of the fantasy cartographers.

To a degree that is honestly improbable, this is entirely in your hands. Enough people are reading this newsletter to make Moonbound a best­seller twice over. Those of you who have preordered already: thank you. Those of you who haven’t: get in here! There’s a zine with your name on it, and a world for you (or a reader you know) to explore.

The poster side of the zine (pictured up above) shows a line from the book, set in the beautiful Job Clarendon by Bethany Heck and David Jonathan Ross. The line is repeated a few times in Moonbound, but the first time, it’s Agassiz the brilliant beaver who says it.

The talking beavers are the least of it.

From the lab:

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around June 3. I’ll include a bit about my Tolkien-esque fictional script, as well as the Moonbound audiobook!

May 2024